#nyu speech

[oh-my-damn]

"This might sound like a very song-writer centric line of discussion, but in a way, I really do think that we are all writers. And most of us write in a different voice for different situations. You write differently in your instagram stories than you do in your senior thesis. You send a different type of email to your boss, than you do your best friend from home. We are all literary chameleons, and I think it's fascinating. It's just a continuation of the idea that we are so many things, all the time. And I know it can be really overwhelming, figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now, and how to act, in order to get where you want to go.

I have some good news; it's totally up to you.

I have some terrifying news; it's totally up to you."

"In your life, you will inevitably: misspeak, trust the wrong person, underreact, overreact, hurt the people who didn't deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrong doing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat.

And I'm not going to lie. These mistakes will cause you to lose things. I'm trying to tell you that losing things doesn't just mean losing. A lot of the times, when we lose things, we gain things too."

"The scary news is; you're on your own now.

But the cool news is; you're on your own now."

You're on your own, kid. You always have been.

[geminisee]

via zayydante

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Members of a private WhatsApp group, including billionaires like the CEO of Dell and the former CEO of Starbucks, allegedly used the chat to discuss ways to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to crack down on Gaza solidarity protests at the city’s universities, according to The Washington Post. AJ+ has not seen the chat messages referenced in The Washington Post’s report directly. ⁣

⁣

NYPD officers raided encampments at schools like Columbia University and the City College of New York, arresting close to 200 protesters in just one day. The police raid at Columbia in late April was the first on-campus mass arrest in 50 years, with police using riot gear and military-grade weapons against mostly peaceful protesters. ⁣

⁣

While Gaza solidarity encampments have been frequently targeted with violence by police and pro-Israel agitators – and over 2,200 people have been arrested – a study found that out of over 550 Gaza protests at U.S. universities, 97% have been peaceful. ⁣

⁣

…⁣

Senior Producers: Kareem Yasin, Ben Angeloni⁣

⁣

[porterdavis]

I suppose if he had praised Israel as a liberator in Gaza it would have been OK? Both The Hague and the ICC have called Israel's actions there 'war crimes'.

You don't have to be a hair-on-fire pro-Palestine fanatic to have concerns.

So much for free speech.

[drsonnet]

Campus in Crisis! by Eli Valley

May 3, 2024

[tayfabe75]

"Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel hopelessly lonely, but because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs that would get me a ticket somewhere else. Having label executives in Nashville tell me that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music and there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster made me cry in the car on the way home. But then I'd post my songs on my Myspace and yes, Myspace, and would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music, but just didn't have anyone singing from their perspective. Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes critical, pieces about who they perceive me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation, but it also made me look inward to learn about who I actually am. Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by minute, ever fluctuating social relevance and likability. Getting canceled on the internet and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine."

May 18, 2022: During her commencement speech for NYU, Taylor mentions finding solace in other teenage country fans on Myspace when she was just starting out, and shares how those spectating her love life taught her to guard her private life fiercely. (source 1, 2)

[swiftlyguards]

shout out to taylor swift for being my therapist

[mysticcheesecakebouquet]

She should sue

Labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr, who is Palestinian American, was being honored by NYU Langone Health for her compassion in caring for mothers who had lost babies when she drew a link between her work and the suffering of mothers in Gaza. “It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said, according to a video of the May 7 speech that she posted on social media. “This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons.” Jabr wrote on Instagram that she arrived at work on May 22 for her first shift back after receiving the award when she was summoned to a meeting with the hospital’s president and vice president of nursing “to discuss how I ‘put others at risk’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘offended people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute towards the grieving mothers in my country.” She wrote that after working most of her shift she was “dragged once again to an office” where she was read her termination letter and then escorted out of the building.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Excellent work by Lex McMenamin for TeenVogue

[candle-wax-and-polariods]

👋

Fave swift award speech??

I love almost all of her speeches in general but my favourite award speech was probably when she won women of the decade in 2019, and separate from this question my favourite general speech is her NYU 2022 speech

[aquamarine-moonlitpool]

Full transcript

“I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career, and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope and friendship.”

[zvaigzdelasas]

New York University led by troubling example when the school shared an updated code of student conduct last week. Ostensibly aimed at curtailing bigotry, the new language instead shuts down dissent by threatening to silence criticism of Zionism on campus. Students who speak out against Zionism — an ethno-nationalist political ideology founded in the late 19th century — will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.[...]

Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include “Zionists” and “Zionism.” Referring to the university’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy, known as NDAH, the updated conduct guide says, “Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.”[...]

“Using code words, like ‘Zionist,’” the guide says, “does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the NDAH policy.”[...]

The entire premise of the guidance — that “Zionist” must be functioning as a “code word — is a flaw egregious enough to reject the entire document outright.

The language here is of utmost importance. The text does not say that “Zionist” can and has been used by antisemites as a code word, which is no doubt true. Instead, it takes it as a given that, when used critically, “Zionist” simply is a code word.[...]

According to NYU’s guidance, then, Zionist and Zionism are either antisemitic dog whistles when invoked critically or a protected category akin to a race, ethnicity, or religious identity. Ethically committed and politically informed anti-Zionism — including the beliefs of many anti-Zionist Jews like myself who reject the conflation of our identity and heritage with an ethnostate project — is foreclosed, and the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which has existed as long as Zionism itself, is all but erased.[...]

“For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the NYU guidance says. And this is of course true. That does not, however, make Zionism an essential part of Jewish identity.

There are conservative Christians for whom the damnation of homosexuality is a key part of their Christian faith too, but Republican lawfare to see homophobic positions enshrined as protected religious expression have been rightly and consistently condemned by the liberal mainstream.

“The new guidance sets a dangerous precedent by extending Title VI protections to anyone who adheres to Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, and troublingly equates criticism of Zionism with discrimination against Jewish people,” NYU’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine said in a statement in response to the updated conduct guide.[...]

“Furthermore, the new guidance implies that any nationalist political ideology (Hindu nationalism, Christian nationalism, etc.) that is integrated into some members of that group’s understanding of their own racial or ethnic identity should be entitled to civil rights protections.”

27 Aug 24

[gatheringbones]

[“It’s a vision of unpatriotic masculinity soothed into submission by uniformed womanhood—at least, womanhood with a badge. The colonial vision of social work it conjures is armed, yet sensitive.

Our culture is saturated with these social workers: weary, gun-toting heroines of carceral gender progress, glamorous avatars of the thin blue line. From Charlie’s Angels to Cagney & Lacey, from Decoy to The Silence of the Lambs, not to mention Prime Suspect, Top of the Lake, Killing Eve, Jessica Jones, The Fall, Mare of Easttown, and literally hundreds more dramas and procedurals featuring various kinds of armed female civil servants, we are conscripted in our millions every day to pay our respects to the lady cop. She is allowed to be “imperfect.” (Sociologists have found that, in real life, policewomen often employ emotionally flat, macho, dehumanizing speech patterns in their dealings with civilian women.) Feminism means cutting the lady cop some slack. Even if she’s “an imperfect protagonist,” the trail of women’s empowerment she’s on is blazed by weapons with state-backed legitimacy. Her feminism is a disciplinary saviorism, a fantasy of a benevolently undemocratic route to sisterhood. Feminist progress, for the cop feminist, is something she can impose from above, compassionately, but also, if need be, coercively. What is she here for? To rescue all of society, and sometimes (especially) to use her womanly instincts to rescue other women—even from themselves.

In the past, as we shall see, feminist Freikorps were often a bit of a laughingstock and became something of a nuisance to the government. Nowadays, in contrast, the cop feminist typically treads the hallways of Harvard, the International Criminal Court, NYU, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, or the American Philosophical Society. Her arguments come in new and sophisticated flavors of self-described radicalism. And yet, cop feminism is sometimes part of a self-described revolutionary politics. A cop feminist may even understand on some level that the prison-industrial complex is a vast support system for white capitalist patriarchy, and yet nevertheless believe that female police officers don’t serve the interests of class power in quite the same way male cops do. For her, the sheer feminist force of the woman with a gun is not fatally diminished by the gun in question’s tie to the armed wing of the state. She feels pretty confident that women cops don’t murder unarmed Black people; that women cops don’t harass sexually active women on the street, nor post vile comments on police union message boards; that they have a positive effect on the community; that they serve as little girls’ best defense against sex traffickers and other predators; that they’re just what the police needs in these trying times, what with public trust in the institution being so eroded; that they simply care more; or that they look good in a uniform.”]

sophie lewis, from enemy feminisms: terfs, policewomen, and girlbosses against liberation, 2025

[tayfabe75]

"I started writing songs when I was twelve and since then, it's been the compass guiding my life, and in turn, my life guided my writing. Everything I do is just an extension of my writing, whether it's directing videos or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on stage performing. Everything is connected by my love of the craft, the thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end. Editing. Waking up in the middle of the night and throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a newer, better one. A plot device that ties the whole thing together. There's a reason they call it a hook. Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me and I can't focus on anything until it's been recorded or written down."

May 18, 2022: During her commencement speech for NYU, Taylor describes the various aspects of her career as extensions of her writing. (source 1, 2)